My heritage is: Some White European, some Italian, and Portuguese and maybe... some black down the lines... and American and Polish? And I've learned a lot of racial jokes and stereotypes about them. I have learned Portuguese is a lot like Spanish. And that some white people give their little girls bizarre names... to me at least? :)

"What's the longest and hardest thing a Polish bride gets on her wedding night?"

"Her last name."

Being of mixed heritages hasn't truly affect me much because... I look mostly white girls' looks. Yet my mom sometimes gets call out re: being Native American? Um, what? She's Italian, Portuguese and Polish NOT Native American. Sometimes peoples assume that, like if I take Any prideful feels re: any of my nationalities then... I am playing racial and political minorities' games? I couldn't even mark that I am a mixed breed on applications because I look like a white girl so. Not that being limited from benefits really impacts me? Where I live it's all white bread, Mormons, and no LGBTs or hardly even peoples of other races. So: Ultimately my mixed breed status doesn't come into play much.

Oh, and I have learned things about Italians. Like: How to be emotive, how to make curses with gestures and... that Italian mothers sometimes feed people when they come to their houses, they know how to make foods I enjoy too.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

A quarter Italian, slightly under a quarter Dutch, slightly over an eighth Irish, an eighth each Scottish and German, about an eighth some mix of English and Welsh and stuff I can never remember (that sliver of Irish that puts me over an eighth comes from here too), and 1/32nd black via what's now the Netherlands Antilles (which is what makes that Dutch part slightly less than a quarter).

Fun fact: that black ancestor is my direct matrilineal ancestor, so as far as mitochondrial DNA tests would say (never mind the one drop rule), I'm "black", though I don't look it at all. I mostly take after the Germanic (/Dutch/English/etc) sides of my family in looks, with a little hint of the Celtic (Irish/Scottish/Welsh) bits in there too.

I've never taken a DNA test or anything but I'm pretty uninterestingly British. My paternal grandfather's from the Channel Islands where his family have been basically forever, my paternal grandmother's from Halifax in Yorkshire, my maternal grandfather's from somewhere in England with some blood from the Welsh borders, whilst my maternal grandmother's half English, half Irish. So I guess that makes me 1/4 Norman, 1/8 Irish, maybe ~1/16 Welsh, and the rest (7/16) English.

I think for lots of Europeans there's not a whole lot of mixing except between neighbouring countries or recently so things tend not be too interesting. People from settler colonial nations tend to have more of a mix because of their inherently mixed ethnic nature. The main thing Europeans might have (other than a bit of ancestry from neighbouring nations) is some Jewish ancestry although, obviously, given recent history, many of those people fled to the US or UK so are no longer in most of Europe.

Does anyone know any sources that explain how they gather data for the results?

A relative of mine, with Mexican heritage, recently posted results to face book, and I thought it was interesting there wasn't a Spanish or Iberian category, but "Celtic/English" and "North African", groups that were fighting over Spain in the pasts couple centuries, were on there.

What I expect is similarly Boringly British. But more North-British. Patrilineally, my surname comes from the Scottish Borders, and the geographic movement in the last couple of centuries has been provably slow. Barring cuckolding at one point or other, an odd choice of bride-stock or two along the way or just some sort of adoption event messing up the 'official' family tree, I'll definitely have significantly Britano-Celtic roots, probably input from scandinavian bloodlines.

Matrilinially, I don't know a fraction as much about my mother's side, but no obvious traces of exoticism. What worries me more is that it is said that one inherits propensity for late-life baldness from the maternal grandfather, but whilst he was very much thinned atop, my hair seems to be going nowhere, so either that's not a hard and fast rule or there's a kink in the inheritence line that doesn't match what everyone assumes (i.e. grandma having strayed?). That's where I'd most expect to see the most significant genetic surprise come from, if only I could narrow it down that much with some form of back-sequencing.

But I've been thinking of doing one of these things, one day, so I thought that if I marked my card on thid issue right now then maybe a future necro of this thread would push me over the line, and then I'd report back once I'd done the deed and gotten the results.

Any suggestions as to places that one could approach? Mostly for histogeographical analysis, but I know there's also a big business in (optional) disease/propensity-for-condition gene identifications, too. Which I'm probably personally going to do nothing about (too late to do me much extra good, mostly) but some people might be interested.

FWIW the heritage I described above is not from any kind of DNA test, just what my grandparents have told me of their ancestry. Dad's dad's was Italian, dad's mom was Irish-Scottish, mom's dad was German-English-Welsh-Irish in some mix I can never remember right, and mom's mom was Dutch except for her great-grandma who was black.

cephalopod9 wrote:Does anyone know any sources that explain how they gather data for the results?

A relative of mine, with Mexican heritage, recently posted results to face book, and I thought it was interesting there wasn't a Spanish or Iberian category, but "Celtic/English" and "North African", groups that were fighting over Spain in the pasts couple centuries, were on there.

I'm actually not surprised by that at all. The Celts came to the British Isles from northern Iberia IIRC. And even then the Celts were everywhere in Europe.

I am, as I understand, 1/4 Russian, 1/8 Lebanese, 1/8 Syrian with bits of either Czech or Slovak as well a Yugoslavian, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, English, Austrian, and Comanche. Some of the details on my father's side art a bit fuzzy. My last name is Germanic but my paternal grandfather immigrated from Russia. My father's whole side of the family is Jewish, and I often heard of how my grandmother was a living stereotype. A true story I heard that sounds like a a joke:

When my father and his brothers were at dinner, their mother would ask the first one to take a bite, "Do you like it? Is it okay?"

My father grew tired of this so one day he took a bite of rice and quickly said, "Mmmh, that's good rice."

cephalopod9 wrote:Does anyone know any sources that explain how they gather data for the results?

A relative of mine, with Mexican heritage, recently posted results to face book, and I thought it was interesting there wasn't a Spanish or Iberian category, but "Celtic/English" and "North African", groups that were fighting over Spain in the pasts couple centuries, were on there.

My father's side is where I get: English, Irish, Scottish... bunch of peoples I never even met let alone have any real knowledge of? And, one of my mother's family members is worried about her ancestry. Whenever peoples asks her, "Where do you come from?" She assumes they don't mean, "What state you come from?" and instead that they somehow think she's got African in her or whatever? LOL white ppls panic over their heritages?

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

I had a whole post here about how these kits are terrible (incredibly inaccurate, strengthen people's racial biases, compare today's population's to today's populations without taking into account massive movement throughout history, the companies can use your DNA as they will including providing it to the police or give your data to an insurance company to refuse you service, etc.), but the somehow it got eaten up. Anyway I'm not going to do those kits.

As for me, my maternal grandparents were born in Romania and my paternal ones were born in Russia and Poland. I'm a very typical eastern-European Jew.

Zohar wrote:I had a whole post here about how these kits are terrible (incredibly inaccurate, strengthen people's racial biases, compare today's population's to today's populations without taking into account massive movement throughout history, the companies can use your DNA as they will including providing it to the police or give your data to an insurance company to refuse you service, etc.), but the somehow it got eaten up. Anyway I'm not going to do those kits.

I think there are issues with them, but I don't think I agree with all the reasons you gave.

They aren't *incredibly* inaccurate, they have been used to destroy peoples racial bias by revealing that they are some not insignificant amount of minority they hate, and afaik, they definitely don't make statements about anthropological migrations.

I've spent an altogether probably not surprising Izawwlgood amount of time arguing with racists on the internet. Pointing to 23andMe results has turned some pretty heavy people away from being completely racist to only mostly racist.

The data sharing is hugely problematic. I think there's a lot of legal handwringing about data ownership that was started specifically because of these companies.

cephalopod9 wrote:Does anyone know any sources that explain how they gather data for the results?

A relative of mine, with Mexican heritage, recently posted results to face book, and I thought it was interesting there wasn't a Spanish or Iberian category, but "Celtic/English" and "North African", groups that were fighting over Spain in the pasts couple centuries, were on there.

I'm actually not surprised by that at all. The Celts came to the British Isles from northern Iberia IIRC. And even then the Celts were everywhere in Europe.

The exact route by which the Celts arrived in Britain's not clear, but they probably originated in the area around modern Switzerland, Austria, and Southern Germany, also, given tribal names, it seems likely that the Brythonic speakers of Great Britain (ancestral to the Welsh, Cornish, and after they were displaced by the anglo-saxon migration, the Bretons) probably came from the area around Calais and Belgium. Linguistically, current consensus is that the Goidelic speakers (ancestral to the Irish and Scottish Gaels) diverged from the pre-Brythonic speakers after the latter had separated from the continental Celtic languages rather than representing a separate migration to the British Isles as had been the earlier consensus (based on a single shared isogloss between Celtiberian and Goidelic and ignoring the many more shared between Brythonic and Goidelic, as well as on some attempts at interpreting Irish myths but that's pretty tricky)

This review of DNA kits opens with a lot of the relevant criticism. Most of these tests claim things that they can't actually back up with science with a high certainty.

I'm glad you've been using it for good (though "I guess I'm part African so I shouldn't be racist" is kind of a shitty reason not to be a shitty person). I've also seen people celebrate their exoticism because they're apparently 3% Dakota or something, and I've seen people (literally in my own family) celebrate how white they are because they're 97% Ukrainian.

My point about anthropological migrations is when they say I'm 50% Romanian, they wouldn't be saying "You match people who lived in Romania 100 years ago". They would be saying I match people who live in Romania today. And no offense to Romania, or any other country - but who knows where they came from? Humans moved around a lot, and there's no way of telling where my ancestors actually lived or where their other descendants live today.

I've been meaning to do a genetic test with my wife, however I think more information will be gleaned from my test than hers, as she is Mexican by heritage, with a large percentage being native-mexican-"indian." As far as I understand it, there aren't many data points in popular genetic testing for these sort of background.

My mother's side has been traced back to The English/Scottish border regions: Blackwood, Douglas clan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Douglas) as well as a Magee family line, which is also Scottish/Irish in origin.

Father's side is a touch more iffy, being of Quaker origin, who adopted quite frequently (Great Grandfather was adopted, rumor was he once claimed he had Swedish heritage of some sort). However the parts that we do know was that his side were Ulster Scots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Scots_people) which were relocated to Ireland from the Scottish/English border for apparently being cattle thieves.

Interesting fact:

A terrible act against the Douglas Clan was the basis for the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, an event called "The Black Dinner" I even have a cousin with the same name as a Game of Thrones character.

Belial wrote:I am not even in the same country code as "the mood for this shit."

FWIW, what these kits are doing isn't THAT complicated. I can't make any claims about which has a better database, but pointing to probable ethnic groupings of heritage is not something that requires a terribly complicated set of molecular tools or database queries. The devils in the details, I suppose, regarding specificity of claims, but without sounding too much like Walter from Big Lebowski, "You wanna check for Neanderthal heritage, I can check for Neanderthal heritage, fucking amateurs".

Zohar wrote:'m glad you've been using it for good (though "I guess I'm part African so I shouldn't be racist" is kind of a shitty reason not to be a shitty person). I've also seen people celebrate their exoticism because they're apparently 3% Dakota or something, and I've seen people (literally in my own family) celebrate how white they are because they're 97% Ukrainian.

Definitely. These views are shitty, so it's not surprising that merely pointing their argument at them is a simple and effective enough way of dismantling it. At a minimum, the notion of borders and peoples being where they are NOW as where they have been FOREVER AND EVER is moronic enough that people who aren't cognizent of this reality aren't worth really having these debates with in the first place. Shrug. IzawwlgoodMileageMayVary. And yeah, it's sometimes bizarre that people simultaneously want to claim purity of descent as well as unique exotic sidenotes.

Zohar wrote:My point about anthropological migrations is when they say I'm 50% Romanian, they wouldn't be saying "You match people who lived in Romania 100 years ago". They would be saying I match people who live in Romania today. And no offense to Romania, or any other country - but who knows where they came from? Humans moved around a lot, and there's no way of telling where my ancestors actually lived or where their other descendants live today.

I'm not sure if that's how these testing kits are doing it. I was under the impression that they were identifying clusters/patterns prevalent in communities deriving from place X, and saying 'you bear some of these markers, and thus are Y percent descended from people of that ethnic grouping.

We can tell quite a bit about human migration by sampling people today. It's not nearly as definitive as racists want to make it sound, but it's also not nearly as fuzzy as I think you're making it sound. There are pretty reasonable ways of telling which people lived in which general area at which time.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

what is "what did you learn" referring to? meaning, specifically, what have you learned about your racial makeup (i.e. through dna tests or genealogy or family lore or what have you?) or, meaning, what has being $race taught you about yourself/society/your culture/etc? or some other question i am not thinking of?

You want to know the future, love? Then wait:I'll answer your impatient questions. Still --They'll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate,The cards and stars that tumble as they will.

Izawwlgood wrote:FWIW, what these kits are doing isn't THAT complicated. I can't make any claims about which has a better database, but pointing to probable ethnic groupings of heritage is not something that requires a terribly complicated set of molecular tools or database queries. The devils in the details, I suppose, regarding specificity of claims, but without sounding too much like Walter from Big Lebowski, "You wanna check for Neanderthal heritage, I can check for Neanderthal heritage, fucking amateurs".

The problem is that they only have their own information to go on, and most of their information is being gathered by self-selecting groups. That is, people who pay for the service.

They're also getting too specific in some cases. Making up shit here, say you're Vietnamese (and all Asian groups have little to no data in places like 23 and Me). You send your shit in and it comes back. You have a marker shared by Western Europeans and one by Northern Europeans. Your chart says France and Norway and because there's limited south-east Asian data, it ignores that people who study genomes have wondered for years how markers that exist in Laos also exist in Western Europe and Northern Europe, but separately.

So instead of "Yeah, you got some Laotian in you, not really a surprise given geographic proximity" you're now wondering what the hell your ancestors got up to in the early 1900s.

heuristically_alone wrote:I want to write a DnD campaign and play it by myself and DM it myself.

heuristically_alone wrote:I have been informed that this is called writing a book.

natraj wrote:what is "what did you learn" referring to? meaning, specifically, what have you learned about your racial makeup (i.e. through dna tests or genealogy or family lore or what have you?) or, meaning, what has being $race taught you about yourself/society/your culture/etc? or some other question i am not thinking of?

Both of those thank you for asking for clarification sir. :)

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

My brother keeps talking about how the Nintendo DS had a feature that... tells you how relate you are to someone you take a pic of or whatever? And it said: He related to a black kid he just met! LOL forever @ technologies guessing games.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

SecondTalon wrote:The problem is that they only have their own information to go on, and most of their information is being gathered by self-selecting groups. That is, people who pay for the service.

I *think* even the earliest of these services were basing their findings on previously collected genomics data, stuff that was collected like... 40+ years ago.

There are definitely assumptions made, but if you go around the world sampling populations, you'll find trends. One can then use those trends as baselines for piecing together relationships. To over simplify, if a whole community of people living in a remote rural area have marker series X, and then town over has Xa, and the next town over has Xb, and yet another town over has Xc, then you can somewhat look at the migration of people around that area. Extrapolate, connect dots, etc.

I think a misconception is that these are absolutes. It's population genetics examining heritage - there's some wobble, even though you can compare to existing populations, and recognize to what extent those populations were intermingled.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

I’m a pretty generic white American. Feqnkly, I’ve got little idea of what my heritage is other than it’s mosty (if not entirely) from Northern Europe. The last people to immigrate in my family came from Norway in like the 1860s or 1870s (that’s where my last name is from). I think there was also immigration around that time from Germany, but that’s it (there were also a couple people who immigrated from Canada around that time too, but I’m talking about going to the New World for the first time). I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of Scottish, Irish, and British ancestry as well.

What I do know is that I have ancestors from most parts of the US — one branch of my family was in the South for a long, long time. Another branch was from the more northern colonies (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, etc). Another branch spent time in Northern California (prior to the gold rush). Lots of people on both sides of my family were in the Midwest for a while too.

I kind of get why somebody would want to use those kits — it’s interesting to know about your ancestors. But they don’t do a particularly good job from what I’ve heard — there’s not really enough sampling from certain areas. I also think the differences between areas probably aren’t specific enough to seperate, say, Swedish from Norwegian heritage. Plus, I’m wary about what they’ll do with my data. What’s to stop them from selling insurance companies the information that I have disease markers for x, y, and z?

My mom use to talk about her Polish maternal or paternal grandmother? And she, like, had ten kids. And she was nice to my mommy and help her learn about gardening and cooking. She makes all her meals from scratch. She makes Polish and Italian stuffs because her sides of the family are Polish mostly yet on the other sides there's Italian? So she learns to make Italian dishes. Wish I could've met her....

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

Ginger wrote:My mom use to talk about her Polish maternal or paternal grandmother? And she, like, had ten kids. And she was nice to my mommy and help her learn about gardening and cooking. She makes all her meals from scratch. She makes Polish and Italian stuffs because her sides of the family are Polish mostly yet on the other sides there's Italian? So she learns to make Italian dishes. Wish I could've met her....

My great-grandfather was Polish. I don't really remember him, but I have a picture of myself sitting on his lap when I was maybe 2-years-old.

Other than that, I'm roughly 3/4 German and 1/8 Irish. I like to say that I'm 112.5% Irish though, because my birthday is St. Patrick's Day.

If you like Call of Cthulhu and modern government conspiracy, check out my Delta Green thread.Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments.

Most of my extended family doesn't talk to us. They think we too lowborn or whatever? So I don't know much about my other heritages. Just the white bread USA Catholic ones, some of what mommy tells me re: her old Italian, Polish, Portuguese relatives and... almost nothing about knowledge of how my daddy's sides are? I don't really like feeling disconnected from my extended family. They just exclude us and never, ever talk to us why, why? :( *Cries helplessly.* </3

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

nicholasbrooks wrote:There have to be legal policies to protect people against 23AndMe and other DNA companies from selling your DNA results to other companies.... I smell a conspiracy.

Not 100% on topic, but over the weekend, I heard a segment on a sports radio show where one guy was advocating for the sale of "game-used blood" on Ebay (I'm pretty sure he wasn't serious), and the other guy was enumerating all the reasons that would be bad. Not one of the reasons he listed was the potential misuse of genetic material.

If you like Call of Cthulhu and modern government conspiracy, check out my Delta Green thread.Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments.

I not worried about getting scammed by DNA peoples. I don't need to know my full DNA ancestry anyways. I mean it'd be nice. But most racial histories tells a lot of: Stereotypes, the winners of wars in other countries dictating their cultures and histories, immigrants lose stuffs when they travel to their new areas... so family histories would be incomplete even if I could trace my DNA lineage as far back as it took to find the black people in such a lily white girl. Or the British. And then: I find out I'm actually related to Kate Middleton.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

We all are. Might need to go back a few generations1, but anybody proven to be an exception to this would be wise not to draw attention to it. Even by claiming the opposite.

1 One estimate of 3000 years (at 30 years per generation gives a suspiciously round figure of 100 generations) as the maxiumum necessary distance to find the Most Recent Common Ancestor. And I bet it won't be even half that for two people already linked by a clear European decent.

I mean, she's from a posh family sure, but she was still a commoner rather than a member of the nobility (prior to her marriage to Prince William) which was actually portrayed as kinda a big deal in the British media (it was the first time someone that close to the throne had married a commoner, at least as their first spouse). So being related to her probably isn't as unlikely as you think.

Obama is famously related to Elizabeth II by their shared lizard-person heritage being 10th cousins, thrice removed. Now I'm not saying Barrack's mother was lowborn, but the titled nobility that lies up there (just slightly beyond the brother1 and sister2 link that makes everyone in the two branches below them into cousins of various degrees) had been diluted to 'normal' plebian/colonial levels by the time she arrived on the scene.

And that's just the legal parentage. It may or may not have a bearing on DNA parentage, which could have had someone with Edward VII's reputation (or deserved of one) cross-linking some genes over in another part of the tree at a later date, or one of the acknowledged descendencies actually being a fiction to cover up a totally different situation (affair or adoption) leaving us needing to reach back with different (longer) branches to find the true point of final seperation.

At some point, though, all measures of relatedness (so long as the 'paperwork' still exists to be found, in that instance) can eventually tie you in to the Duchess of Cambridge. And the Duke. I'm not saying that you're just a small note (sent on vellum parchment) away from being added to the Buckingham Palace hand-written christmas card list, but you will be related to her, unless your whole direct ancestry has been living under a rock for at least 4.5 billion years. And hers too (different rock!).

I mean, as far as being special this is about as unspecial a way as you get about being special in your relationship, if you boil it down to two numbers (how far up you have to go, to find the common ancestor, and then how far down the other side again), but it's food for thought and basically undeniable.

1 11xGreat-Grandfather to POTUS#44, if I count correctly.2 8xGreat-Grandmother to HRHQE2, ditto.

My mother's side of the family is 'English', which is a fancy way of saying I have no clue. My father, though, is 1/2 Irish, 1/4 Scottish, 1/8 Portuguese, and 1/8 Coast Salish (Pacific Northwest indigenous band). I also apparently descend from two famous leaders who were on opposite sides of a generations-long conflict that's still going on today.

What I've learned is that being 1/16 métis is good enough for the government but not for actual people. I'm much too white bread. But it did cause me to reflect on how much appearance makes a difference in how people perceive you. I've known other people who don't look indigenous but have a far better claim to being métis than I.

The only thing that really matters is how society around you views you.

Much like how Obama said that the taxi drivers who refused to pick him up in Chicago didn't see him as "half white". They saw him as black. You are black if people think you're black, you are white if people think you're white, etc. There are lots of people with strong Hispanic or Arab heritage who everyone else assumes is 100% "white" (whatever that means). So it really, really doesn't matter how german, french, swedish, dutch, italian, english, irish, polish, russian, latvian you are. Not if you're a second+ generation American. You're all just white.

My ancestry came from...well, judging from my grandparents last names, Ireland, Italy, Quebec/France and England(?). Does this make me *any* different from another person my age whose ancesters came from Greece, Portugal, Poland and Scotland? We're all treated the same, and there are relatively few ethnic enclaves left in the US like there were in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Time have changed, and they all assimilated.

I cringe when someone says "You're a good cook! It must be the Italian in you". I honestly feel this is two or three steps away from accepting racism entirely. I mean, we're pretending like our ancesters homelands is relevant to ourselves today, and assigning ourselves traits according to it. Also, I really don't like the idea of someone claiming they're an expert on race because they're 14% Cherokee. Again, what matters is how society views you, not what DNA information you happen to know about yourself.

Americans need to be proud of their own culture, and not try to take the culture of a country they've never been to as part of their own.

General_Norris: Taking pride in your nation is taking pride in the division of humanity.Pirate.Bondage: Let's get married. Right now.